Freeminded.org

Ok, so OSX has a fancy terminal which can have transparent backgrounds etc. Surely, it looks really cool and ‘high tech’, but after some time you’ll want to settle back to usability: drop the shiny crap and get back to work. It took me nearly 15 minutes to figure out how to do this, and found several obscure ways when I finally resorted to googling after I could not find the option in Terminal’s Preferences. This is a problem I often encounter with Apple’s stuff, configurability is minimal and stuff is at weird places. Ok, so here goes.

You DO NOT need TinkerTools, you DO NOT need to edit config files, it’s really in the config pane, you’ll find it here:

1. Open the Preferences
2. Click the ‘Window’ tab
3. In the center of the screen, there’s the ‘Background’ and with the ‘color’ of the background.
4. You get a colorpicker, and voila, on the bottom is an opacity slider

I did not expect the opacity slider to be in the colorpicker, so I didn’t click on it on first attempt.

So, tring to change the transparency / opacity of your Terminal window? Use the colorpicker in the ‘Window’ tab!